About David Hicks

Perceiving agricultural cycles as allegories for human struggle, David Hicks crafts ceramic compositions from individual gourd-like structures that reference the journey from fertilization to decay. Hicks’s hand-formed terracotta pieces are coated with a copper-infused luster that fuses to his glazes and results in a thin, undulating, metallic surface. He favors such finishes because they allow his sculptures’ forms and surface color to be the main focus rather than their place in history or chemistry. Hicks clusters his individual clay pieces to form compositions that are either suspended from the ceiling with natural fiber twine or supported by free-standing or wall-mounted metal armatures. While Hicks’s compositions function as whole objects, the complexity of each component parallels the compositions of still-life paintings, in which individual elements cohere to demonstrate the artist’s virtuosity.